Beer bottles in your jeans?

MANILA, Philippines - It’s possible to do more with less.

Levi’s is committed to this dictum as it integrates sustainability in all its endeavors. The jeans company is all about rethinking the way it does things to improve its products and reduce its impact on the planet.

In 2009, Levi’s launched the Care Tag for Our Planet, to not only instruct consumers how to clean their clothes with less environmental impact but also to encourage them to donate unwanted jeans to goodwill.

In 2010, Levi’s rolled out Water < Less technology in its jeans around the world, enabling the company to produce pairs of jeans that need less water for washing. This year alone, the company was able to save over 360 million liters of water with its Water < Less collection. 

According to the company’s own assessment, cotton is one of the biggest sources of environmental impact in its products. Armed with this knowledge, the company’s technical people looked at how they could be more resourceful with existing materials and cut back on their virgin cotton consumption. Thus the birth of Waste < Less collection. Each Waste < Less product will include a minimum of 20 percent post-consumer recycled content — or, on average, eight recycled bottles.

Through the jeans company’s many partners, PET plastic materials (brown beer bottles, green soda bottles, clear water bottles and food trays) are collected through recycling programs across the US. These materials are sorted by color, crushed into flakes and made into a polyester fiber. Next, the polyester fiber is blended with cotton fiber, which is finally woven with traditional cotton yarn by Cone Denim to create the denim in Levi’s Waste < Less products.

With Waste < Less, Levi’s is doing its own small part by taking waste — in this case, recycled bottles and trays — and making something new from it. By using recycled materials in its products, the company is incorporating less virgin cotton to make its Waste < Less collection.

Waste < Less jeans are the same stylish, well-crafted, high-quality jeans that you expect from the clothing brand. But the color of the bottles used adds a beautiful undertone to the denim fabric creating a unique finish in the final product.

The collection is available for men’s jeans 504 New Straight and 511 Slim Fit.